Fox's Modern Table

[Eric.]

51 minutes ago, Denette said:

Is there a definite advantage of ARS over wipe-on poly when it comes to figured grains? Also, is the grain-popping method Marc used in his video on the pencil holder still good info? It's been a long time since he made that, and things change or new products are released. I'm looking at getting some Transtint medium brown for popping the grain. It's another first for me on this project.

Technically, ARS IS wipe-on poly...it's nothing more than diluted "urethane."  Their exact formula is proprietary and therefore unknown...but it is "poly" in a wiping formula.  Unless you are asking for a direct comparison between the two products: ARS vs. Minwax Wipe-On Poly.  In which case there is little difference.  ARS has a slightly more amber color and I feel like Minwax might be slightly thinner.  I prefer ARS because of its color, but I think Minwax might have a slight edge in terms of working properties (specifically, in terms of ease of application).  You can always add a dash of mineral spirits to help ARS flow and level if you find you're having issues.  I usually do this with the third and any consecutive coats.  Both brands are going to give you a very similar effect in your cherry, with ARS offering a slightly richer color.  Figure pop factor is going to be basically the same since they're both oil-based...imperceptible difference, if any.

IMO "popping the figure" with Transtint like Marc demonstrates in his pencil holder videos is a bad idea in this situation for a couple reasons:

- Figured cherry does not behave the same way as curly maple.  If you add dye to the cherry, it's going look a lot more like "blotch" than it will like "pop."  The physics of the grain in the two different types of figure are just completely different and react to dye in two very different ways.

- Cherry needs no help with color (this is my personal opinion about maple too, but with cherry it's especially true).  Mother Nature has done her work, and will continue to do her work for years and years to come, turning that cherry into a rich brownish-red color.  Patience, grasshopper...it doesn't take long...six months or a year even in indirect sunlight and you will have completely noticeable darkening.  You'll be happy you left it natural, I promise.  Dye will only muddy things up.

As usual, test boards are your friend.  But I can pretty much guarantee the straight varnish is going to look better than varnish over dye (in the long run, which is what matters most).  This is not to say dye isn't used by even the highest-end builders...D&W use it on cherry (it's possibly just garnet shellac...essentially the same effect as dye, IMO...artificial color, that is), and yeah it looks good...but it only looks like the cherry is gonna look naturally in a few years, and if you skip it you'll sleep better at night.  At least I do.  Dye is fake boobs.

 

[Denette]

43 minutes ago, Eric. said:

Dye is fake boobs.

 

 

Somebody needs to put that on a plaque.

 

I already tested a bit with satin Minwax wipe-on poly on the surface of the board before I planed it down to 3/4", and I was pretty happy with the look of it.  I hadn't considered that if I added dye to the equation I'd have dye that never darkens over wood that does - Probably won't go that route.  

I might do a little testing on the underside/inside of the panel - cover it with amber shellac, sand it back so the shellac stays in the end-grainy parts of the figure but everything else is clean again, and then apply the wipe-on poly.  That said, I'm just testing - I'm not altogether convinced that it will really yield good results.

[Denette]

 

This week I did some shop upkeep that needed to happen in order for the project to turn out well. I made a sharpening station for all my sharpening stones, then sharpened all my chisels and planes to shaving-sharpness.

 

 

Today I tuned up my table saw - the fence and blade were out of alignment with the miter slots and with one another. The fence was also wobbly, so I tuned that up. I then made a new cross cut sled. This thing is dead on!

 

 

 

I got a few good cuts in on the new sled - I cleaned up the ends of a couple of the glued-up panels, and trimmed them to 24" in length. The project may start moving faster now that I have some more trustworthy tools!

 

[Eric.]

Sometimes it feels like preparing for woodworking is all the woodworking you get to do.  Necessary evil.  Keep on truckin'.

[Denette]

 

Tonight I got to practice the complex case joinery on a bit of scrap. I ran out of time about halfway through, but I'm a little surprised by how what seems mind boggling at first really feels attainable with enough knowledge, patience, and diligence. I actually feel like I'll be able to make the joint work.

 

 

I started making the joint with careful layout. Since the stock is all ¾", I made the dovetails 9/16" and the mitered bit that encases it the remaining 3/16". The first cut to make on this joint is a rabbet along the length, stopping short of the mitered ends. I'd seen lots of people doing this part with hand tools online, but I decided to forego those in favor of a router table and fence.

 

 

It gave me a little bit of trouble near the ends where I needed to stop carefully. When I'm doing the real project I think I'll add in marks for where to stop, rather than eyeballing it and creeping up to the line. I only got kickback when it wasn't tight to the fence, so next time I'll start by marking the starting and stopping points and taking several light passes rather than one big chomping one.

 

 

The next step was to mark out my dovetails. I realized after marking my first piece that I'd done the tails first while what I've read advises to do the pins first. I decided to plunge on ahead anyway, because, as I see it, there are scores of people who swear that tails must go first, and scores of people who swear on pins-first, and since I'm a novice at dovetails it probably won't make much difference either way.

 

 

 

EDIT: more coming soon, Tapatalk is being stupid

 

[Denette]

Once I had the rabbets cut into the ends, I used the rabbeted edges as a guide for my striking knife to mark the bottoms of the dovetails.

 

I used an el cheapo Irwin flush cut saw to cut the mitered end a bit proud, and trimmed it a little closer to tame with a chisel, but I plan on figuring four a shooting board solution for putting the final angle on it.

 

After this point I sketched in some dovetail angles. As I mentioned, accidentally did the tails first. I didn't really worry too much about the precise degree of the angle, but I did use a bevel gauge to apply the angle consistently across all the dovetails. I made one a little wider because it fell on a seam where the scrap was glued together, and I figured a little more beef couldn't hurt anything. I followed the bevel gauge with a scribing knife to sever the fibers, then marked the waste bits with a pencil, then chiseled a saw kerf into the waste area using the scribe line as a starting point. I used the same old trusty Irwin pull saw to cut a 45° cheek halfway into each dovetail, then proceeded to try to chisel out most of the waste.

 

About halfway through that I decided it was inefficient, especially when the router table was still set up to the perfect depth. I used my boards as reference to set up the fence:

 

 

And I then did some blind trimming that I never would have done if I weren't practicing on some scrap that was too small to safely use the router on top of.

 

Dovetails with scraggly waste-filled insides go into the table:

 

Pay really close attention to where you're at and don't go into the sides of your dovetails! I'm just removing enough waste to make chiseling the sides of the dovetails way easier.

 

An added perk is that the bottom of the joint is now perfectly flush with the bit I routed first.

 

So that's about where I got to tonight. I hope to get the other side done tomorrow and work on fitting the two, which I'm sure will be an adventure.

 

Also, there's no way I'm getting this thing done before our son gets here, my wife is already having contractions at odd intervals, doc says it should be sometime this week. Pretty soon I'll get to start desensitizing a baby to hearing shop noises through the walls!

 

 

[Eric.]

9 hours ago, Denette said:

Also, there's no way I'm getting this thing done before our son gets here, my wife is already having contractions at odd intervals, doc says it should be sometime this week. Pretty soon I'll get to start desensitizing a baby to hearing shop noises through the walls!

The one good thing about having a newborn baby in the house is you're up all night and never getting any sleep anyway...so you might as well sneak out to the shop and squeeze in an hour or two of work at three in the morning...and you can do it without your wife thinking you're on drugs. LOL

Nice work so far.  Looks tedious.

[Denette]

Only a little tedious.  Honestly it's new enough to me that the difficulty level and learning curve make it more of a fun challenge than tedium.

 

Also, it occurs to me now, once my son is born I'll have a new reference point for finishing smoothness - baby butt.

[Eric.]

2 minutes ago, Denette said:

Only a little tedious.  Honestly it's new enough to me that the difficulty level and learning curve make it more of a fun challenge than tedium.

 

Also, it occurs to me now, once my son is born I'll have a new reference point for finishing smoothness - baby butt.

Is this gonna be your first one?

[Denette]

1 minute ago, Eric. said:

Is this gonna be your first one?

Yes sir!  I know it's going to be a game changer.  The little dude should throw a surprise birthday party any day now.

[Alan G]

Game changer indeed. My twins will turn 8 thursday. Goes so fast.

[wtnhighlander]

You will also have a new reference with which to compare the smell if fresh-cut zebrawood. Dirty diaper.

[Denette]

Well, I made a joint - sort of.

 

I started by marking it up - and I now know why people say to do the pins first. It's a pain to transfer the angle when it's buried in a blind joint.

 

This part was pretty much the same process as with the previous joint. A little routing in the dark to get a nice flat socket. Only a little wobble outside the lines, but I'll be much more careful on the actual project, this was just a proof-of-concept run.

(the chewed-up bit at the end caught on the router bit. Am I crazy or do spiral bits snag way more when approaching them from the side? I'll try a straight bit next time.)

 

The next step was to clean out the rest of the waste with a chisel. This part once again made me a believer when it comes to pins-first dovetails. The grain orientation when chiseling this part is an obstacle to say the least, with things wanting to split along the grain. Adding an angle that I have to try to match to another board on top of the grain orientation is just needless trouble. Live and learn!

 

The joint's interior cut:

 

And the tighter-than-it-should-have-been test fit:

 

Not perfect, but it's a start! The next step is to put a 45° chamfer on the long edge. I could have been at this for a long time with hand tools trying to set up a guide which does not yet exist, but then I remembered that I had a 45° chamfering router bit. A little careful and clever setup left me with a perfect 45, though in hindsight I may have cut too deep (more on that in a minute)

 

With that cut, then next task was to get the dovetails fitting a little smoother. I actually had one piece snap off under the pressure of the first test fit and had to reattach it with CA glue, so this was a necessity. To spot the tight spots, I coated one half of the joint (the half I didn't want to shave) with heavy pencil marks:

Then I put the two together and pulled them back apart.

The high spots rubbed the graphite and highlighted themselves. I've done this before for tenons - much less fidgety than other methods I've tried of sussing out high spots.

 

The next test fit:

 

Hmm. How did that happen? Maybe the dovetails are a little too tall? To the shoulder plane!

I shaved off the marked parts by about the thickness of the gap...

 

Huh. Well, I sort of did it? I think I must have had the router set to remove just a liiiiittle too much when I cut the 45° angle along the length, but that's just a theory. Any other bright ideas?

[Llama]

What do the two pieces look like apart from the side? 

This pic, after all the fitting... 

 

[Denette]

Like so! I'm pretty pleased with myself, gap or no gap. Following through and making it, even if flawed, feels good.

[Denette]

 

Alright, joint practice, take 2! This time I did everything with hand tools after the initial rabbet that cuts the relief for the ends of the rails and pins. The result was a much better fit in all aspects. It fits together much more tightly and I feel better about the structural integrity of it. I did pins first and saved myself a headache when it came time to transfer the angle. I emptied out the waste with a chisel and trued up the bottoms with my router plane - much better control than a 2hp router. The dovetails are a piston fit, and it takes a lot of effort to get it apart. It's even self-squaring! I like this joint. This table will be bombproof if I am able to perfect the joinery.

 

 

I made an improvised shooting board (just a 45° angle cut down the length of some 8/4 ash) and clamped it to my bench to cut the miter for the corner. I started with a shoulder plane, but it kept catching on the shooting board, so I switched to a bench chisel and used the shooting board as a registration surface. I can vouch that the edge is indeed a true 45° this time. Last time the router bit chewed up and frayed the ends anyway, so this gets much better results.

 

 

The one problem, I'm frustrated to say, is that I still have a 1/32" gap running neatly around the outside of the miter.

 

 

 

Here is what I think happened. When I cut the mitered edges on the end with my handsaw, I must have been careless and cut the shoulder on the wrong side of the pencil line. At the shooting board, I noticed that the material I was removing felt a bit off. I'm not certain that this is where it went wrong, but it's a working theory. I'm going to try to make another practice joint and see if I can leave the material for the 45° edge a bit proud, then sneak up on a perfect by test fitting, marking, and test fitting again until it's just perfect.

 

 

 

 

It's improving, but it's not there just yet.

 

 

If I torture it and bend it out of square, the edges line up perfectly, so at least that is right! The last one didn't even do that.

 

 

 

[Denette]

Also, the gap formed in that last picture where the joint is out of square to make the miter close up? Yeah, that gap is exactly the width of my saw's kerf times two, so that's almost definitely the problem.

[wdwerker]

If there are tiny gaps in a mitered joint try rubbing both sides of the glued miter with the shaft of a round screwdriver. The glue softens the wood fibers and you can bend them slightly to close the gap. I rub both sides of the miter . 

[Denette]

If there are tiny gaps in a mitered joint try rubbing both sides of the glued miter with the shaft of a round screwdriver. The glue softens the wood fibers and you can bend them slightly to close the gap. I rub both sides of the miter . 

Thanks for the tip! I'll be sure to try that once I get the gap smaller.

[Denette]

I'm getting closer to having this joint figured out.  It's clear to me that I need to make some sort of jig, but here's how test joint number three is going so far:

 

The dovetails themselves were cut out in the same way as the past two test joints, though they came out much, much better than the first two sets.  Zero chipped bits, no substantial gaps.  If nothing else, this project is teaching me how to dovetail the hard way - when it comes time to do a regular dovetail it's going to feel like I've switched to easy mode.  "What do you mean I don't have to manually chisel out the bottom 45° of the cheek?"

I intentionally left a solid 1/16" or more of wiggle room on the mitered faces this time.  No more coming up short!  I'll have to get brave and sneak things down to a tight fit, but I definitely won't lack for material to work with like I did on the previous two test joints.

I did have a nasty bit of tearout due to some of the irregular grain in this figured cherry - I'm going to have to really watch it on the actual project.  I noticed this bit long before it got this bad, but I'm almost out of CA glue and didn't want to waste it on a test board.  I know how to fix it, I just didn't.  

The joint I'm working on is made from the back ends of test joint #2, so ignore the nastiness up there - I tried some desperate measures to get the gap miter to come together, and it didn't work.  What to note in this picture is how tight those dovetails are coming together - no gap!  I love it.

This is how the outside corner looked before I tried to put any miter on it.  Plenty of material to work with.

And the interior before I tried mitering anything:

Here is my miter setup, and definitely the weak spot in my plan.  It's just some 8/4 ash with a 45° angle cut on it.  Does anyone know of a jig that would do a good job of this?  Because I'm drawing a blank.  

On the previous test joint I tried to use my shoulder plane, but it ate into the shooting board and ate into the ends of the dovetails.  This time I went with a nice broad chisel for better control and good registration on the shooting board.

This is about as far as I was willing to go on the shooting board.  Much more and I'm scared that I'll do something just a liiiiiiittle too much.  I have no reliable way of positioning the workpiece on the shooting board.  I haven't got a clear idea of how much material to remove.  It's killing me that this last step is what is blocking my progress, but at least I'm getting lots of good practice in.  

 

Here's how my joint looks from the outside after my nervous nearly-finished mitering:

And here are a few detail shots of the parts that still need trimming.  Note the tiny vertical face between the top of the dovetails/pins and the miter - In theory, that should be the exact amount go 

 

So now I'm at a point where I am tired and know I'm going to be tempted to cut corners and try to figure out things by my own hardheaded persistence, which means it is time to call it a night in the shop and ask for help!  Does anyone have any plans or know of a good jig that would do what I'm needing done here?  Something that would allow me to securely hold my workpiece square to a 45° registration surface?  My tired brain is not coming up with much tonight.

[lewisc]

 

 

I like your style and tenacity.

[SawDustB]

Looking good. I'm impressed, I probably would have given up on this joint a while ago. I think you're looking for a donkey's ear, aren't you? I've never made one, but it looks like the right jig for the job. Good luck!

[Denette]

Tonight I took a break from the mitered dovetails and actually worked on the project itself. I made the joints for the legs to attach to the crisscross (is it technically an apron?). I started by working with the full board I planned on cutting all 4 legs from, and put it on my tenoning jig with the dado blade set to ¼" to cut the bridle joint.

 

As you'll see in the photos in a bit, the tenoning jig, such as it is, is wanting in precision. My dado cuts were all in the ballpark of 1/32" off center, so that made cutting the tenons a little trickier for my brain, but careful attention to orientation and thickness (and a little luck) helped me get 4 leg blanks matched to 4 tenons.

 

 

I made a last-minute call to modify the legs for strength. I made the crisscross apron 2" tall instead of 1.5", added a shoulder to the bottom of the tenon of approximately ½", and let the legs be as long as the material would allow. The leg bridle joint currently protrudes about ½" above the top of the rail because of the last-minute shoulder, but I think the shoulder should help a good deal with stability. I'm also planning on doing some counterbored dowels just for good measure, unless someone talks me out of it - I'm not too crazy about how they would look on this project, but it feels like I might want them. Dunno.

 

I went ahead and sketched out the profile I'm going to cut for the legs, and I really like how it's looking. I'm planning on cutting the interior side of the leg before gluing it into place, but saving the outside for after it's glued up. I'm doing that for two reasons. First, it allows me to have a square surface for clamping when putting the legs on, and, second, it cuts the tenon perfectly flush to the leg with no fuss.

 

The shoulder aren't perfectly flush due to the wonkiness of the twinning jig I had to use, but it'll sand out, and I can put the two better ones in the front.

 

It feels good to actually work on the project instead of just practicing!

[Eric.]

1 hour ago, Denette said:

As you'll see in the photos in a bit, the tenoning jig, such as it is, is wanting in precision. My dado cuts were all in the ballpark of 1/32" off center, so that made cutting the tenons a little trickier for my brain, but careful attention to orientation and thickness (and a little luck) helped me get 4 leg blanks matched to 4 tenons.

What kind of tenon jig are you using?  If you're using the good ol' painted cast iron one that every tool company on the planet makes...

You can just flip your board around and make two cuts...which will center your bridle.  Or are you using some other contraption?

[Denette]

What kind of tenon jig are you using?  If you're using the good ol' painted cast iron one that every tool company on the planet makes...

You can just flip your board around and make two cuts...which will center your bridle.  Or are you using some other contraption?

 

It's a wonky shop made MDF thing that rides on top of my fence. It's definitely not perfect, but it had been a while since I used it and I'd forgotten just how not perfect it is.